


To the Point of Invention

by Felle_DesignWorks (Felle)



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:40:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26016640
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Felle/pseuds/Felle_DesignWorks
Summary: Edelgard frets over her wife's fondness for creating spells with a worrying penchant for backfiring.The war had been easier than this, truly.
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg/Constance von Nuvelle
Comments: 3
Kudos: 55





	To the Point of Invention

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jtav](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jtav/gifts).



“The initial reports sent by Queen Petra seem extremely promising, a joint venture with Brigid may be well worth the investment provided that our agents can confirm what we’ve been told. It may take some time to recall the right people from the Almyran border to ensure everything is as the queen says, as we have no appropriate consular staff left in Brigid ever since it was released from its protectorate status…”

Edelgard looked at her finance minister, cheek resting in her hand, with all the careful neutrality she could manage. _She_ knew that Petra wouldn’t sign anything false, and Ferdinand wouldn’t have let her, but the comment was more about her putting Brigid and Adrestia on equal terms and renegotiating the extremely favorable tariffs that had made Adrestian citizens rich at the archipelago’s expense. Citizens like the finance minister’s in-laws.

The emperor pretended not to notice the comment and waved her hand. “Recall them, then. See if this island has the resources Petra wrote of. And then draft a proposal based on what they say.” She suppressed a grin at seeing the way her councilors ruffled in response to such a casual address. The bell attached to the clepsydra in its alcove nearby chimed four times. At least the day was almost done. One more hour and she could leave, perhaps half an hour if she pled indisposition. But she’d used that one the week before, hadn’t she? Edelgard flipped through her mental list of excuses. The weekend was upon them, she didn’t want to be working right up to the end of the day—

Everything shuddered all at once as what sounded like a peal of thunder, or cannon fire, ripped through the still air. Hubert and Shamir were on her before she had grabbed the table to steady herself, spells and arrows at hand, scanning the meeting chamber for any signs of assault as other guards ushered the ministers away. Courtiers allowed to attend the council meetings began hurrying off the backbenches on either side of the room, pushed into the side passages by guards trying to keep anyone from slipping through the usual cordon and charging the emperor.

“Let’s go. Too open here,” Shamir said. The nock of her arrow pushed against its bowstring. Edelgard’s hand drifted to the dagger at her hip as she stood and left through her entrance at the back of the chamber, flanked by her guards. It opened onto a narrow corridor that wound between more public areas and let out at the imperial apartments, where they could see wisps of smoke curling near the ceiling at the far end. Hubert put a hand on Edelgard’s shoulder to still her as Shamir took a step forward, his grip tightening ever so slightly at watching his wife put herself in harm’s way. After a moment, her hold on her arrow relaxed, and she lowered the bow. “Does that smell like…chocolate?”

Edelgard took a testing whiff of the air. It certainly wasn’t nitre from blasting powder or ash, as she might have expected to smell during an assault. It took her a few tries as her sense of smell was less refined, but she picked it up soon enough. Chocolate. One of the sweeter kinds that was mixed with milk.

“I think I know what happened,” Edelgard said. The smile she had been fighting before now crinkled her cheeks before a resigned sort of amusement turned to worry. Chocolate or not, an explosion was still an explosion. She rushed down the hall, ignoring the sounds of protests from her guards, until she had burst into the imperial apartments and felt her way through clouds of delicious-smelling white smoke. They caught up with her before she could open the door to Constance’s laboratory, where all the smoke seemed to be billowing from. Hubert stood in front of her while Shamir kicked the door down, ready with her sword. She sheathed it almost immediately after waving the smoke from her face, and Edelgard saw her breathe a sigh of relief. As soon as Hubert lowered his guard, Edelgard ducked past them both and into the room. “Oh, Constance…”

Her wife was sitting in the middle of her laboratory, rendered catatonic by the sunlight filtering in from the new hole in the ceiling. Dust kicked up from the collapsed section of roof had piled up on her head, making a gray splotch in her blonde hair. Some of her half-finished experiments were scattered around the room—tea that held its shape despite its cup being removed, paint that changed color depending on the angle of observation, quills that wrote without inkwells—but none of them looked to have blown up. In fact, apart from one workbench and the ceiling, the room looked fine, if a bit smoky. Some new project, then.

“Your Majesty,” she said slowly, looking down to avoid meeting Edelgard’s gaze. The emperor knelt down to brush away the dirt on her head. “Please allow me to offer my most humble apologies before you have my head cleaved from my shoulders for this terrible event.”

“Stop that, no one’s losing their head over this. Least of all you. Are you hurt?”

“It would seem the goddess has left me unharmed so that you might determine the exact degree of my punishment, in your infinite wisdom.”

Edelgard finished brushing the last of the derbis from Constance’s hair, but a shadow shrouding her eyes still remained. Edelgard kissed her forehead. “Let’s get you out of the sun so you’ll start talking like a normal person again. Stand up, dear.”

Constance did so, rising until she stood a head and a half over her wife, and allowed Edelgard to guide her out of direct light. The change was immediate, as usual. Edelgard was never certain whether or not Constance remembered the things she said and did in her sunlight-induced fugues, but she certainly acted like she didn’t. As soon as she raised her head enough to remove the shadow cast by her hair, she reached down and seized Edelgard around the waist to lift her up. “Oh, Edel, darling, I hope all the excitement didn’t bother your meeting!”

Her feet dangled some ways above the floor until Constance set her down, making sure to peck her cheek before straightening up. “Well, now that you mention it,” she began, silently waving off Hubert and Shamir behind her back, “most of the court was a bit shaken by the explosion, but I’m just glad you’re all right…what were you doing in here?”

“I could tell you, but I think it would be more effective to show you!”

Edelgard glanced at the hole in the solid stone above them. “Telling is perfectly fine, really—”

“Ta- _dah_!”

Constance produced a peach with rather more fanfare and flourish than was really necessary, given that they had several trees growing them on the palace grounds. It looked nice as far as peaches went, not the kind that would have been mashed and baked into a pie for some blemish or other, but still just a peach. Edelgard humored her by looking at it from a few different angles. “Is it supposed to talk or some such?”

“I actually do have a spell that does something similar, but it’s not ready yet. Go on, try it.” Constance took a paring knife and cut a slice that she then offered. Edelgard turned it between her fingers to see if she could divine whatever had been done to it. When nothing obvious showed itself, and her own small talents with magic couldn’t unravel it, she shrugged and bit into one side. “Hmm?”

“It tastes like chocolate!”

Edelgard took another bite to confirm it and quickly finished the whole slice. The overall texture was the same, but the fruity and slightly acidic taste was gone, replaced by a sweeter kind of cocoa. Constance grinned at her reaction and cut her two more slices, which disappeared as soon as Edelgard got her hands on them. It was a bit undignified, and some of the juices threatened to slip down her chin and stain her brocade, but she was too caught in the same kind of mania that overtook Constance when she got a new idea and shut herself up in her office for half the day to experiment to care much.

“And yet it still has all the nutrition of a peach! All that’s changed is how it hits your tongue. Only, the spell as it’s currently composed is a bit temperamental about what it considers _food_ ,” Constance said, waving a hand toward the hole in the roof. “I sneezed and must have aimed it at the ceiling when I covered my mouth, which…did not respond all that well, as you can see. But that only means I have to clean it up a bit! After all, based on what it did to the air, I think the stone would taste like chocolate if anyone were to taste it. Maybe if I used some different runes for stability, or changed the diverting channel on this side…”

She began mumbling to herself, though Edelgard doubted she would have understood anything even if she’d been louder. Constance turned back to her workbench and grasped around for paper and one of her bottomless quills to trace out a new design, back in her own world. Edelgard looked again at what was left of the ceiling and the thickness of the stone above them. Thankfully the spell had fired at enough of an angle that none of it had come down directly on Constance, but the distance was far too short for comfort. A hard lump settled in her throat and her stomach went cold.

Constance started to cross the room to get something from another bench, but stopped short before stepping into the light shining in from above. “Well, this won’t do,” she said absently.

“Let’s call it a day, I’ll have Hubert make arrangements to get this rubble cleared out and a tarp put up on the roof. After we let this place air out a bit, that is. And you could stand to change out of those dirty clothes.”

After some convincing, Constance eventually allowed herself to be led out of her laboratory, which Edelgard told a servant to block off until a mason could assure her that the rest of the ceiling wasn’t going to cave in, and to the imperial bedchamber near the middle of the wing. The smoked glass of the windows in their quarters allowed in just enough light that it wouldn’t trigger a fugue, but with the sun beginning to set it wasn’t enough to see comfortably. A servant was still lighting the candles in the chandelier hanging in the middle of the room when they entered and nearly fell off her ladder at their unexpected arrival. “Please, don’t stop on our account,” Edelgard said as they ducked into the washroom.

Her stomach was still a knot as she brushed the remaining dust and debris she had missed the first time from Constance’s hair, then shrugged her out of her blouse and dress. Constance was still speaking, describing how she might refine her spell, but no matter how she tried Edelgard couldn’t focus. Her mind filled instead with more terrible outcomes to the spell mishap, finding her wife wounded or worse—

She buried her face in the crook of Constance’s shoulder and shuddered, unable to suppress tears at the terrible images her mind conjured for her. “Oh?” Constance reached back and patted her head, taking care not to disturb her crown. “Did my Edel have a long day?”

“Yes…yes, you could say that.”

Sometimes Edelgard wondered if there was a way to stand Constance half in the sun and half in the shade to give her some balance between being too blithe and too morose. But how could she express her worry about one of the things that made her adore Constance so much? She took off her gloves to feel Constance’s skin against hers, wrapped her arms around her wife from behind, and squeezed. After a few minutes she asked, “Edel? Is something the matter?”

“I…wanted to hug you, that’s all.” Curse her. Fighting a war had been easier than this. “What color nightgown would you like?”

Edelgard mulled over her quandary all through dinner—politely declining Constance’s offer to adjust the taste of her roasted capon to chocolate—and through the quiet time they carved out for themselves afterward, before going to bed. She sewed a button eye back on one of her favorite stuffed bears while Constance lounged on the bed, balancing a book on her stomach to refer to while she practiced the hand motions required by some spell or other. The sight was arresting, and her thumb was sore from being poked by the needle several times when she finally set the bear down on the table, repaired once more.

Constance was trying to imitate the flourishes with her hand indicated by the page she was reading, weaving sourceless light through the air with her attempts, when Edelgard settled on the bed beside her. “Is that a challenging one?” she asked, peering at the book. “It’s not one I’ve seen before.”

“The basic motions are Alymran, but the thumb shapes are a fiendish style from Morfis. Usually I would need sharper movements, but I have to practice adding the graceful swoop at the end.”

Edelgard suppressed a sigh. She really had to do this, if only for her own peace of mind. “Constance.”

“Yes, darling?”

She waved away the remains of her previous attempts, shut the book, and sat up so they were level with one another. A sheet of double-toned blonde and violet hair tumbled over one shoulder. Constance reached toward Edelgard’s face and brushed something from her cheek, then drew back enough to show off a length of thread from the stuffed bear repairs. Edelgard wrapped her fingers around Constance’s and softly kissed the back of her hand. “Do you ever…worry about these experiments of yours? For your safety, I mean.”

“Do you mean that little mishap this afternoon? A silly oversight. I’ve already designed a new rune that should be more forgiving of mistakes, and with a bit more tweaking I should be able to overlay all sorts of other tastes. Strawberry, banana, vanilla—even multiple flavors at once!”

Edelgard could sense that they were getting off-track. Before Constance could really start in with whatever new ideas her mind had jumped to, Edelgard chanced to put a finger on her wife’s lips. Constance fell silent, more out of surprise than anything. It wasn’t something she ever did, but this was important. “Please let me say my piece, won’t you?”

Constance cocked her head with a guileless, curious look, then nodded. Edelgard took a breath.

“I love how inquisitive you are. Truly, I do. Seeing your eyes light up with some new idea or spell is one of the greatest joys I know. It reminds me of the way you smiled on our wedding day. Sharing you with your work, as it were, is a meager price to have you in my life. But…” Edelgard thought of the right way to arrange her words. Did anything she said before _but_ really count? “But I can’t stop worrying about you. As much as I know that you’re an adult and capable of looking after yourself, seeing something like this afternoon gives me the most horrible thoughts. If all that stone had come down on top of you, and I’d found you like that…I don’t want to think about it, but I do.”

Her face was burning, and tears began to mass at the corners of her eyes. One rolled down, then another. And then the dam broke. Before Edelgard knew what had happened, she’d clapped one hand over her mouth to keep from sobbing, and Constance’s look of concern was little more than a wet blur. “I can’t lose you,” she managed to choke out. “How could I go on if the thing you loved killed you? Please, let me be selfish in this. I only want you by my side.”

“Oh, Edel, come here.”

Constance swept her up in her arms, nestling Edelgard’s cheek in the crook of her shoulder. A long, graceful hand stroked circles over her back. She was still shuddering and staining Constance’s nightgown with her tears, but the emotions she had crashed into began receding ever so slightly. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she said, rocking Edelgard back and forth. “Breathe, darling. You’ll make yourself sick like that.”

It took some time. Giving voice to her worries only seemed to make them loom larger in Edelgard’s mind, and it was a long while before she’d soothed herself enough to feel cogent again. By that time it was Constance’s turn to tremble, and she held Edelgard tighter to compensate. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. You deserve so much more than fretting over me. I’ll find a way to make things safer. Hire an assistant or two. Anything so you won’t shed these tears. The last thing I want to do is make you cry with the spells I make for you.”

Edelgard eased back with a long, steadying breath. Constance dabbed at the remaining tears with her sleeve as Edelgard asked, “For me?”

“Of course,” Constance said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “I know how you love sweets, but you always worry about eating too many. So, I thought if I could make something healthier taste like sweets…”

“That was for me.”

“It’s all for you. It’s always been for you.”

Constance smiled and brushed a hand through Edelgard’s hair. She didn’t think much of her own hair, the color or the prematurely aged texture or the way the ends split from the press of her crown, but Constance held it so delicately, like it was the most precious golden flax. “My darling emperor.” She edged forward, and Edelgard happily acquiesced to her kiss. The depth of it turned her still-raw emotions to warmer, happier places. “My sweet wife. I would pull the stars down to earth if you asked it, just so they would shine brighter on you.”

“I hardly think such drama would be necessary…”

She pulled Edelgard into another kiss, and another, and another. Soon her cheeks were flushed, and a quiver danced in her stomach. “Necessary,” Constance repeated, breathing the word over Edelgard’s cheek. Her hand cupped the nape of Edelgard’s neck, pressing ever so gently on her skin. “Your Majesty, you wound me. Do you think I don’t consider it _necessary_ to impress upon my wife the depth of my love for her? I do. Oh, I do.”

Her fingers moved achingly slowly around Edelgard’s throat, to the lacings at the top of her nightgown. Constance rolled the silk between her fingers. “May I remove this?”

Edelgard nodded and leaned forward the slightest bit. “You may.”

It was all one piece, and once Constance had opened the collar enough to fit around her head Edelgard picked up the bottom to her waist and got onto her knees. Constance rolled it up slowly, worrying her lower lip between her teeth as she exposed more and more skin, until she could ease it off and toss it aside. Edelgard started to shrink in on herself, the way she always did when her scars were on display, but Constance only leaned forward and kissed the jagged line that ran from her navel to her breastbone. “I wish I could show you the way I see you,” she murmured, her voice tickling into Edelgard’s skin. Her arms wrapped around Edelgard and dragged slowly down her back, to the little dimples above the swell of her rear. “Lie back on the bed, please. I want to clear some space.”

Edelgard did so, nestling into the small mountain of pillows at the headboard, while Constance put her book and scribbled notes on the bedside table. She shimmied out of her own nightclothes, and Edelgard watched with rapture as her body moved this way and that. Her elbows were still red from leaning over her desk all the time, and the same habit made her touch at a twinge in the middle of her back. Constance’s shoulder blades poked out the tiniest bit against the curve of her back when she reached up to smooth out her hair, and the mark on her thigh where her pegasus had bit her stretched with each movement. Edelgard so wanted to paint her like this. Was this the way Constance saw her? The perfect sum of imperfect parts? She touched at the scar that had enjoyed such attention before. “I don’t want them,” she said.

Constance turned around and slipped back onto their bed, easing Edelgard’s legs apart to sit between them. “Pardon?”

“I don’t want the stars. Just you.”

She reached for her wife’s cheek, and Constance’s hand closed around hers. “You have me. And you always will.”

Constance took her hand and kissed it, then her wrist, her forearm, and all the way up to her shoulder before trailing back down. Her lips danced over Edelgard’s collarbone and then her breasts, flitting at her nipples before moving away with a grin. “You’re a tease,” Edelgard said through a hiss, winding one hand into Constance’s hair and tugging the smallest bit.

“Well, I _could_ go back, if there’s nowhere else you’d like attended to…”

A diabolical choice. Edelgard pursed her lips, then loosened her hold on Constance’s hair. “Hey Majesty knows what she wants, then.”

She kept creeping downward, paying attention to what felt like each and every mark and scar on Edelgard’s stomach, before her lips crested the last swell and brushed into a patch of thick white hair. Edelgard bit the inside of her cheek in anticipation. She had to be a mess by now, she could feel it. Constance was mercifully done teasing, and her tongue lashed a slow line over Edelgard’s sex before circling her clit, making pleasure lance up through her. Dainty hands closed around her thighs to hold her still as she continued, and Edelgard arched her back and rocked her hips up toward Constance’s mouth as much as she could. “Please,” she whispered in a cracking voice. Constance’s half-lidded eyes gazed up at her, red flushed all over her face. A little smear of arousal shone on her cheek. “Please keep going…”

It was a plea Constance was only too happy to answer. Her pace mounted steadily, drawing Edelgard tight with need even as Constance’s movements became more erratic, until the last shred of resistance broke and Edelgard cried out. Every muscle went slack at once before shivering and twitching, and a wave of sweet, ecstatic pleasure radiated through her body at a slower pace. Her mind whirled around the single thought that was her wife. “Constance, Constance, Constance,” she said, whispering her name like a litany. Constance eased up the bed and laid beside Edelgard, one hand draped possessively across her chest.

“I’m here, darling.”

She drifted longer than she usually did when they made love. Everything felt so comfortable and safe, she worried she might fall asleep then and there until Constance said softly, “You look so peaceful.”

“I suppose you’ve put me under a spell.” Edelgard turned on her side and pulled Constance closer to her until they were flush against one another. This woman was truly the only kindness the goddess had ever done her. “Now, if you have no objections…I believe there are a few things I’d like to impress on _you_.”


End file.
